Unveiling the sacred : reading the gendered female body in contemporary Pakistani fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English Literature at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand (original) (raw)
Related papers
Transcending Patriarchal and Cultural Construct in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride
Theory and Practice in Language Studies
This study aims to show how patriarchal civilizations physically, emotionally, and socially oppress and enslave women. Sidhwa has shown Pakistani gender-based class system quite effectively in her work. She discusses marginalized and double-colonized Pakistani women as victims of patriarchal culture who confront a variety of national and household challenges, and overcomes patriarchal and cultural constructs in order to be in peace with society and culture. This paper ‘Transcending Patriarchal and Cultural Construct in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride’, attempts to show how women in patriarchal cultures and societies suffer many issues in their lives and how they repress their needs, longings, and emotions in order to find a comfortable position in their households as well as in society at large.
" One is not born but rather becomes a woman " – writes Simone de Beauvoir in her book, The Second Sex. The feminist writers defies the representation of women as weak, docile, innocent or seductive in the cultural texts such as cinema, music, painting, soap opera and literature. These cultural texts normalize the subordinate position of women and helps patriarchy, in retaining the power structure. A woman is projected as an object of pleasure and her primary function as procreation. Women are trained to fit into these roles which are not natural, but social. The woman's womb is reduced to the status of power sites. The existing inequalities are the constructions of the patriarchal society to maintain the hierarchy. Cultural institutions like religion, family, education and art, validates this representation. This re-assertion naturalizes the idea 'biology is destiny' and suffices the institutions in maintaining their positions. The three texts-The Pakistani Bride, Train to Pakistan and The Book of Woman authored by Sidhwa Singh and spiritual guru Osho respectively testifies how society constantly trains us to read and write from a man's point of view. These three texts produced during different periods of history consciously or unconsciously reiterate the clichéd idea called 'woman'. Though these writers take different subject positions they ultimately tie women to the stake called procreation
From "Other" to "Self": A Pakistani Female's Existential Quest in Bapsi Sidhwa's the Pakistani Bride
Journal of Languages, Culture and Civilization, 2022
This study attempts to highlight the patterns of existential feminism as they appear in Bapsi Sidhwa's novel The Pakistani Bride, analyzing domestic abuse, which has been a significant impediment to women's advancement and success. This research also emphasizes the existentialist feminist theory that asserts that women are the products of civilization and are constantly expected to appease men, depriving them of all forms of autonomy and turning them into objects for men. This study attempts to illustrate all the scenarios where men are free from all the traditions and rules set by society and exploit the image of marriage. The injustice and abuse of women in Pakistan's tribal regions, as well as their battle for independence, are discussed in this study. A leading existential feminist named Simone De Beauvoir labels males as "Self" and women as "Other." The exploitations of women's lives are examined in this research using the concepts of "Self" and "Other." Nowhere in the novel does a woman exist as an independent "Self." In being the subject, man even forgets his relationship with his object (Woman). Women are punished for acting upon their own will and are neglected. The reason for this study is that the existential experience of the female "Self" in Pakistani fiction has frequently gone unrecognized. Researchers have seldom investigated the dimensions of a woman's life concerning her independent "Self," which she ruthlessly denied. This study digs into this area of a woman's existential Quest.
Deplorable Condition of Women and Patriarchal Domination in Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride
SMART MOVES JOURNALS IJELLH, 2020
Abstract Parsi writers have contributed a lot to Indian English Literature. The Indian Parsi novelists express their feelings in the form of art. The novelists reflect the psychological dilemma of the minority community and its identity crisis through their works. Being a Parsi writer, Bapsi Sidhwa sees a kind of mental migration when she hybrids from her native land, and pours her feelings and thoughts in to her novels. She is known for her exploration of women’s inner psyche who aspire to live in modernity, inept to break traditional quality intrinsic in them. Most of her writings contain a pinch of migration and male dominance taste when one chews them. The expatriate writers face multi- cultural situation which merges with their personal anguish due to prejudice. They project the cultural confusion and confrontation of a multi racial society. The quest for identity, aspiration for belongingness and love for native land is found as a part of non-erasable conscious in all expatriate writers. This paper reveals the socio-cultural background and the authoritative patriarchal Pakistani society in the novel The Pakistani Bride The novel portrays how the institution of marriage and patriarchy deplores and represses an orphaned girl’s self-identity. It also pinpoints the problems of a little girl Zaitoon as an alien in an alien land or culture. It enforces deportation as a pathway to sculpt for belongingness of her ‘self’. At the end, Zaitoon succeeds by rejecting the alien culture and tradition. Key words: Culture, Patriarchy, Quest for Identity, Inner Psyche, Self
2019
This dissertation is a personal and political act of resistance. Through a centralisation of the female body as an analytical construct, my research offers a feminist intervention to discussions about contemporary Pakistani Anglophone writing thereby challenging the often overtly political and nation-driven attention these texts have received. My analysis focuses on the inscription and framing of the bodies of Pakistani-Muslim women in Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke (2000), Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses (2005) and Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (2004). A central claim in this dissertation is that these novels complicate and challenge (if not always deconstruct) popular discourses which define Pakistani-Muslim women in essentialist terms as a homogenous group of passive and voiceless victims of male oppression or of a misogynist religion. Instead, I argue that the female bodies represented in the novels occupy a broader range of positions. While some are "silent" victims, others are highly subversive civic subjects and individuals. The novels portray historically and culturally-specific materialisations of womanhood, born out of a complex interplay between the discourses of religion, politics, desire and sexuality. I also claim that these novels address and write back to both indigenous and global actors. They engage and disrupt neo-Orientalist discourses of Muslim and feminist exceptionalism. At the same time, these novels question the privatisation and domestication of Pakistani-Muslim female bodies in local nationalist and religious discourses. While many of the female characters in these novels resist appropriation in (masculine) discourses of nationhood and religion, I nonetheless observe a problematic Salam iv tendency to portray motherhood, and the maternal body, in ambivalent or even negative terms. I note, too that the implied audience of these novels is a global readership and/or a globalised elite, English-reading audience within Pakistan. In addressing this readership, these novels risk ignoring or even silencing the voices, issues, concerns and aspirations of a local population that is non-cosmopolitan, non-transnational and regional. Despite their challenges to monolithic assumptions about Pakistani women, then, the notion of agency attributed to the female subjectivities in the texts I have considered seems to be refracted through a neo-liberal lens which equates modernity/progress with individualism and secularism. Salam v Acknowledgements I feel exceptionally fortunate to have the opportunity to do research under the tutelage of Dr. Kim Worthington and Dr Celina Botolotto-two incredibly strong women whom I have come to value and love like my own family. This thesis would not have been possible without their continuous and unflinching professional and emotional support, patience, and encouragement. This has been a long and arduous journey stippled with joy, accomplishment, frustration and immense loss. I would not have been able to survive without their help. I am also immensely grateful to them for their perceptive academic advice, for critically challenging me with their insightful questions and suggestions. I am especially indebted to Dr Worthington who, in the last phase of the write-up, went above and beyond in helping me. I am also thankful to Higher Education Commission, Pakistan, whose financial support has been instrumental in enabling me to undertake this research project in New Zealand. I am also grateful to Bahauddin Zakariya University for the study leave which has allowed me to pursue this dream. This journey would not have been possible without the love, kindness and generosity of my friends, Amber Faisal, Sadia Sattar, Khalida Tasneem, Sofia Khanuum and Natasha Mantis. They opened their hearts and homes to me, held me when I needed a shoulder to cry on and dealt some tough love when I needed it. Lastly, a very warm and earnest note of thanks goes out to my family, especially my parents, without their unflinching love and encouragement I would not have been able to make it this far.
An Intersectional Feminist Reading of Bapsi Sidhwa's Water
Journal of Linguistics and Literature, University of Chitral, 2020, 2021
Intersectionality has been recognized and widely taken by interdisciplinary fields that include Cultural studies, American studies, and Media studies to demonstrate a range of social issues. It focuses on the experiences of people in a different social and political context. The intersectional framework confronts significant social division axes that include race, class, gender, and disability that function together and influence each other. These social axes operate the power structures of a particular society that can cause inequality and discrimination. In literary studies, women representation is no more confined to European and American academic writings. Within the feminist framework, the South Asian fiction writers also demonstrate a feminist approach in their works. Pakistani authors have indicated religion's exploitation as one of the central intersectional tropes in their literary work. Bapsi Sidhwa's is one of the prominent feminist voices from Pakistan in diasporic English Literature. One of her novels, Water (2006), is based on Deepa Mehta's award-winning film, explores the life of the marginal and subaltern Hindu widows in India. The novel provides an insight into the intersectional nature of the Indian Hindu widows in a patriarchal society of a subcontinent where different power domains hold and impose dominant hierarchies. The paper's objective is to highlight the intersection of religion, gender, caste and politics against the backdrop of the Indian anti-colonial movement. It shows how power relations can manipulate cultural norms and use religion as a powerful tool to establish its hegemonic control over these marginalized widows who suffer as silent victims.
2021
This paper presents a reading of contemporary Pakistani women"s fiction with a focus on their treatment of the subjects of sex and intimacy. The textual nuances have been thematically presented to situate the argument that Pakistani women writers celebrate the intimate aspects of their lives. Without being disloyal to religious and regional sensibilities, these women are creating and nurturing breathing spaces for them. The data for the study comprises the works of two contemporary Pakistani women writers Maha Khan Phillips" Beautiful from this Angle (2010), and Saba Imtiaz"s Karachi you"re Killing Me (2014). For the sake of conducting narrative analysis, this study relies on postfeminism as a conceptual framework and thematic categories representative of the chick literature genre as a method. The objective of the paper is to bring forth alternative voices depicting the lived realities of Pakistani women, as opposed to the essentialist understanding of Pakistani women.
2017
Pakistan and Afghanistan share a common border near Kohistan mountain terrain. Many tribal communities found in this region are highly orthodox, barbaric and inundated with religious fanatics. Kohistani is one such tribe. Patriarchy is rampant in its social structure and restoration of male honour is one of the most important motives of their lives. Women in such tribes have been devoid of basic human rights since ages. They lead a parasitic life devoid of self-esteem, self-identity and is only expected to self-abnegate. Many writers are challenging such orthodox approach of the religious fundamentalists who deny human rights to a major section of a society named women. Bapsi Sidhwa is one such writer who has blatantly exposed the inhuman practices prevailing against women in Kohistani community of Pakistan by so called preservers of religion and civilization. The present paper tries to examine the status of women in the Kohistani community. It also tries to analyse the reasons whic...
Gendered Subjectivity and Oppositional Agency in Bapsi Sidhwa's the Pakistani Bride
IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2022
Subjectivity is gendered. From the moment of its birth the human infant comes under a regime of gender under which one cannot be a subject without being male or female. Gender, Judith Butler asserts, is performative. It is created by acts which are really socially established ways of being a man or a woman. The "reiterative and citational practice" of gender norms constrains the gendered subject. A woman is "interpellated" as woman so that she internalizes the feminine norms like submissiveness, domesticity and passivity. Similarly, it is normative for a man to be dominant, aggressive and cruel on his women to ensure submission to his will. He has to "disavow" any marks of effeminacy or weakness within him. The gendered subject is constrained to repeat the norm because any deviant behaviour faces social abjection. In this scenario where the subject is socially or culturally constructed and social power, as Michele Foucault points out, does not flow simply from top to bottom but from all the sources familial, cultural and political, how is it possible to theorize oppositional agency? It is possible because the internalization of social norms usually engenders resistances within the subject. It is upto the gendered subject to heed these dissenting voices within her/him and become an agent by deflecting the norm. In Bapsi Sidhwa's The Pakistani Bride the male characters Qasim and Sakhi fail to impress because they mechanically perform the normative assignments of gender in spite of subversive tendencies within them. But Zaitoon, the girl from the plains who married a Kohistani tribal, realizes the inequities of the norm in her changed social position and runs away from her tyrannical husband. She ceases to be the victimized woman of feminist discourses and becomes an agent. I propose to analyze the complicacies involved in gendered subjectivity and the need to subvert gender norms through oppositional agency in my study of the novel in this essay.
History Research Journal, 2019
The portrayals of women by fiction writers of Indian sub-continent can be seen in the context of postcolonial feminism. Sidhwa"s novels may be a part of postcolonial fiction, which is fiction produced mostly in the former British colonies. As Bill Ashcroft suggests in The Empire Writes Back, the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the literatures produced in these areas are mostly a reaction against the negative portrayals of the local culture by the colonizers. About the role of postcolonial literature with respect to feminism, Ashcroft writes, "Literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writings and through other arts such as paintings sculpture, music, and dance that today realities experienced by the colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential." Indian sub-continent fiction is the continuation and extension of the fiction produced under the colonial rulers in undivided India. As such it has inherited all the pros and cons of the fiction in India before the end of colonial rule in Indo-Pak. Feminism has been one part of this larger body of literature. Sidhwa has portrayed the lives of Pakistani women in dark shades under the imposing role of religious, social, and economic parameters. These roles presented in The Pakistani Bride and The Ice-Candy Man are partly traditional and partly modernthe realities women face.